A DVC switchable antenna technique for the hand effect in mobile terminals

A human hand holding mobile terminals causes the impedance mismatch and the signal absorption in the human body and, in result, deteriorates the performance of the mobile terminals. In this letter, we show the hand effect on mobile terminals via appropriate experiments and propose a simple but novel antenna solution that compensates for the mismatch. Our proposed solution exploits the digital variable capacity (DVC), which makes the antenna adapt to the hand effect on mobile terminals. To validate our design, we implement the proposed antenna in band5. Experimental results show that a human hand holding mobile terminals causes losses by 5.39-6.02dB. They also show that the proposed DVC adaptive antenna technique improves the antenna performance as much as 0.47-1.78dB. This study presents new understanding on the effect of DVC that compensates mismatch losses. We believe that antenna designers can exploit this research when optimizing antenna performance.